In order to develop vehicles and/or solve problems, various test apparatuses such as a chassis dynamometer for testing completed vehicles and an engine dynamometer for examining engines themselves as parts of vehicles have been used.
Such test apparatuses are adapted to be able to produce a simulated or virtual load or environment supposed to be produced during an actual run and make the load or environment act on respective parts of a vehicle by setting predetermined test conditions.
The load or environment can also be obtained by, for example, actually running a car on a road. Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication JP-A2001-108580 describes that actual road gradients are measured while running a car at the gradients, and test conditions making loads equivalent to the measured gradients act on a vehicle are set in a chassis dynamometer. Also, Japanese Patent No. 4173112 describes that test conditions to be given to a brake dynamometer for testing vehicle brakes are set on the basis of actual running data obtained through an actual test course run.
However, in any of the above-described configurations, every time the type of a test apparatus is changed, test conditions suitable for a changed test apparatus should be calculated from actual running data, or a data format should be converted. That is, there exists a problem of difficulty to comprehensively manage and operate multiple types of test apparatuses for testing a vehicle and respective parts of the vehicle.